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Adventure Monsters Roles Treasure

How Our Monstrous Fears Are Really Just Trying to Protect Us and Our Treasured Needs

By exploring the motivations and fears of each part, you’ll gain insight into their protective roles and the underlying needs they seek to meet.

Discover Your Parts with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Journal on Rosebud
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Roles Treasure World

Valuing the Needs of Your Roles Within Your Inner World

Rosebud’s IFS guided journal is a powerful tool that brings the benefits of IFS therapy to your fingertips. Developed in partnership with certified IFS therapist David Coates, this journal provides a structured framework for exploring your inner world, helping you identify and understand your various parts, their roles, and their underlying needs.

Discover Your Parts with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Journal on Rosebud
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Roles

Paradoxically Rejecting the Role of “Changer” to Change Roles

Perls’s own conflict with the existing order contains the seeds of his change theory. He did not explicitly delineate this change theory, but it underlies much of his work and is implied in the practice of Gestalt techniques. I will call it the paradoxical theory of change, for reasons that shall become obvious. Briefly stated, it is this: that change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not. Change does not take place through a coercive attempt by the individual or by another person to change him, but it does take place if one takes the time and effort to be what he is—to be fully invested in his current positions. By rejecting the role of change agent, we make meaningful and orderly change possible.

The Gestalt therapist rejects the role of “changer,” for his strategy is to encourage, even insist, that the patient be where and what he is. He believes change does not take place by “trying,” coercion, or persuasion, or by insight, interpretation, or any other such means. Rather, change can occur when the patient abandons, at least for the moment, what he would like to become and attempts to be what he is. The premise is that one must stand in one place in order to have firm footing to move and that it is difficult or impossible to move without that footing.

The person seeking change by coming to therapy is in conflict with at least two warring intrapsychic factions. He is constantly moving between what he “should be” and what he thinks he “is,” never fully identifying with either. The Gestalt therapist asks the person to invest himself fully in his roles, one at a time. Whichever role he begins with, the patient soon shifts to another. The Gestalt therapist asks simply that he be what he is at the moment.

Arnold Beisser, M.D.
The Paradoxical Theory of Change
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Roles

Integrating Our Compartmentalized Roles

If alienated, fragmentary selves in an individual take on separate, compartmentalized roles, the Gestalt therapist encourages communication between the roles; he may actually ask them to talk to one another. If the patient objects to this or indicates a block, the therapist asks him simply to invest himself fully in the objection or the block. Experience has shown that when the patient identifies with the alienated fragments, integration does occur. Thus, by being what one is—fully—one can become something else.

Arnold Beisser, M.D.
The Paradoxical Theory of Change
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Experience Playing Roles

Never Forget You’re Just Playing a Role

Do not take life’s experiences too seriously. For in reality they are nothing but dream experiencesPlay your part in life, but never forget that it is only a role.

Paramahansa Yogananda
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Playing Roles

Jobs Are Just a Role We’re Playing

I came to see that my job was just a role that I was playing—an important role, of course, but not what defined who I am.

Paul Slakey
Everything Connects: Cultivating Mindfulness, Creativity, and Innovation for Long-Term Value